The story that haunts me from this book is the story of Lucy’s toddler sister, Ocean which happens before the book begins. Lucy’s father and Ocean are walking on a path through the woods of Massachusetts. He sets the baby down to sit down on a log to take, I think, off his boot and shake out a stone. He only takes his eyes off Ocean for a minute and, when he looks up, the baby is gone. He looks all around – Ocean is nowhere to be found. There’s no sign of her, no sign of an animal or another person, no deep hole in the ground. She’s just gone. He’s never the same after that and, when he and another of Lucy’s siblings, Golden, contract pneumonia, he fades away.

Although she writes children’s books, books for young readers, Karen Cushman doesn’t pull her punches. In the course of this book, Lucy – whose real name is California Morning but she insists on being called Lucy – is uprooted from her comfortable home in Massachusetts, from her beloved grandparents and her dog, from the library in her small town where her parents owned, not just a home but a barn and a feed store. They were relatively well-off though not rich. Her mother uproots the kids to pursue the dream she and her husband had shared of moving west (her children are named California, Butte, Ocean, Sierra, Prairie, and Golden Promise – clearly, this is a woman with a mission). She spends the profits from the sale of her property, her entire savings, transporting her family west on a ship to California and a mule and cart to take them into the gold rush area, where they live in a tent and live on, mostly, beans, and whatever she can talk the kids into shooting, which isn’t much.

During the course of the book, Lucy’s brother dies, she meets little girls her age who eventually shoot their abusive father. The men in the camp are gritty, unwashed, crude (although they find her mother a civilizing influence). They aren’t the kind of folks that you find in a kid’s book. In the entire Laura Ingalls Wilder series – books set around the same time period – Laura witnesses two drunken men – this, at a time and place when alcohol abuse was a huge problem. The men are distanced from her, safely outside and down the street, while she sits safely inside, sewing. They add a humorous note that Ma, when Laura tells the story later, quickly disapproves of, and the story and the men disappear quickly. Not so, the men in Lucy’s world.

And it works. The world is so vivid that you could be there, in the dusty camp among the tall pines, in the valley along the river. Walking among the wildflowers near the crude shack where her friends live before they murder their father and disappear. A main street of dirt and rocks, the crowded tent where Lucy’s family sleeps on the ground, and cooks what they can for the men who pay for food. The characters – her stubborn and forceful mother, the rebellious Lucy, her pesky brother fading away, all the gritty men, are finely drawn and distinctive.

A well-written book.

You may remember Cushman from her Newbery-medal winning The Midwife’s Apprentice, about a homeless girl in the middle ages who attaches herself to a midwife, or from Catherine, Called Birdy about a different kind of little girl in the middle ages who finds herself engaged, against her will, to an older man, or yet another girl surviving a situation out of her control in the middle ages, Matilda Bone. But you may not have realized that Cushman also wrote books set in America, including this one and Rodzina, about a girl sent west on an orphan train. (And if you’ve never heard of an orphan train, have I got a book for you.)

Most of Cushman’s books involve girls around 12 years old, who have lost protectors and champions, and who are thrown into situations outside their control, dangerous situations that they can’t escape; girls who are – like Lucy – in conflict with the adults in their world. They are strong girls, who set their jaws and survive the mistakes they make, and get stuff done, trying hard to find their way in a world in which they are marginal, and who find a way to survive in the end, even if their way is not what they had originally sought at the start of the book. They are meticulously researched.

Cushman did write one book about a boy, Will Sparrow’s Road, about a boy making his way through medieval England, during a plague. It’s an okay book but her books about girls work better.

In her 80s now, Cushman is still writing and, in drafting this post, I realize she has new books out – books I haven’t read yet! Another couple set in the middle ages and one during the post-war era in the U.S.

I may not have read them yet – but I will soon.

p.s. Hate the new packaging. Who designs these covers? The old ones were fine but now they’ve given them horrible new cover art. Come on, HarperCollins, why would you do this? Now the books look insipid.